I love children.

The one thing the homeschooling co-op has reminded me of is how much I love children. You would think that taking care of six of them all day long every day would reinforce this more clearly, but the dailiness of it is hard to overcome. The first session of group, I sent mine off to their classes and I went to my assignment and the relief to not be teaching was wonderful. But by the middle of the session I'd begun to memorize names and preferences. I was planning for how this problem or difficulty could be overcome. I was thoroughly enjoying all those kids--even my own in a newly refreshed way.
It's even more pronounced this session. I'm teaching two hours of preschool, and the kids are such fun. I'd begun to think of my retirement as a mixture of helping my kids with theirs, writing and taking as many classes as those two things would allow. Maybe not. Maybe I'll keep teaching at the elementary school level. I've found that people are their most authentic selves before they become aware of it. I've been hunting up my students on facebook, and they are just the same as they were in my classroom only freer and stronger. It's an honor to work with kids.

Teaching again

Tomorrow I will be in a classroom full of preschoolers for the first time in a long time. The plans are to introduce them to the "superheroes" of the alphabet and then enjoy How Big is a Foot with related activities. I've really been enjoying preparations. I paid fifteen bucks at Home Depot and got two big and four small write and wipe boards. The big boards will be large enough that I can trace around kids and such.
We're going to make plastic bag capes and talk about how aeiou are the only letters that get to say their name. We're going to talk about short and long vowel sounds. I love to get the kinesthetic kids (and who isn't at this age) up and moving by using our whole bodies to draw the letters in the air.
For How Big is a Foot my husband, who has the day off, will be coming in because his foot is actually a foot long. We'll make models of everyone's feet and measure things to see how differently it comes out with their little feet and Kurt's great big ones. We may act out the story, just for fun. Measuring things is always a good time.
I hope you are going to have just as much fun tomorrow as I will. If you're looking for me, I might be the one in the dinosaur jumper. You never know.

lost m

commend with me a higher love
lower love is lost me
prayer will find the Shepherd out
for whose love I gave me

Poster Boy

As I discover the deeper undercurrents that maintain an unnecessarily high stress level in me, I am returned to the first person who articulated a concept of how human behavior works that matched what I'd experienced. Studying Girard has become a passion though, like everything else, it takes a back seat to the kids and writing. If you haven't read Girard you should. For those who've never heard of him Here is a link to the Wikipedia page and Here is the first page I read about him. His ideas help all of the unthinkable things make sense.
I'll be writing more, but not today.

Sweet Treats

Christmas was good to me. Kurt started with the perfect pair of slippers--very hard to find for a woman who hates anything on her feet. He followed up with the Wii Fit, which is just right on the money. I am in need of a new gimic that's family friendly, and this fits the ticket. My mother bought me a very nice pen inscribed Truth Alone. It's sitting on the "BlueThing" I bought in highschool, some people have wondered what it was like. Finally Kurt told me to just go and buy my own set of the Chronicles of Narnia in hardback. I've wanted them for years. We're reading them aloud each night after dinner.

Layer Cake

As mentioned previously, I've been working on a forgiveness project. At first it was a pretty obvious deal. There was a list of people who'd hurt me in various ways and I was working on forgiving. The more I worked on forgiving others the more my conscience, and in one case the good rebuke of a friend, began to motivate me to seek forgiveness. The experience is like ancient boiler plate falling off. There's a new flexibility. It feels good to say "I forgive you, Papa Smurf" and mean it. It feels even better to say, "I'm sorry I screwed up" and mean it.
As that winds down, I'm discovering whole new layers of stressed out I was too busy with the other stuff to notice before. The first time I played a game based on The Hiding Place I was three. There was a large gathering of moms and we kids were turned loose to play. The girls went into one of the bedrooms and pulled all their tea table chairs into a circle. For an hour or so we sat as quietly as we could hoping the Nazis, aka the boys, wouldn't hear us and we'd live. Any noise we made the boys began banging on the door, yelling mean stuff and throwing pillow bombs through the transom over the door. Being three, it was frequently my fault that we were discovered. It was a lot of responsibility. At five the devil came to my little Wednesday night class to take everyone to Hell who wouldn't deny Christ. The theology on that was pretty bad, but it still had me waking up screaming for a week or two. Just when I thought it was safe to return to class they decided to do a lesson on how Chinese communists were torturing and killing Christians. The next week they were going to cover another region, but I decided not to go back. At six I was avidly reading Buried Alive for Christ. When I was eight we made time lines of how the world would end while those whose parents had let them watch Thief in the Night told the rest of us about the head rolling down the stairs. At ten I went to a camp where twice a day a preacher terrified us about the end of the world and how soon it would be. I was a very grounded and spiritually confident kid, but I went forward every night. Our favorite games were about surviving the end times, the nazis, the communists, rebel groups in Africa, we were always surviving what was always coming. Four square had its attractions, as did cowboys and indians, but that was just playing--concentration camp was practice. As I grew older there were movies about how the credit card was actually a tool to soften us up for 666 on our hands or foreheads. The UN was a very bad idea. Every nation added to the EU was mourned.
I'd never noticed before how deeply that fear had settled into my mind. I'm trying to figure out what to do about a mind that automatically picks up survival tips. I'm trying not to be terrified by not being terrified. I'm trying to get to know God as more than the guy who makes your vitamin oil last until you are released from your concentration camp. I dropped most of the ideology pretty quickly, but the theology is still a bit of a muddle. I no longer think our infallible leaders are infallible. A mother was asking of the Jr. version of Left Behind was a good gift for her nephew and I very quickly and emphatically said no. My kids know that Christ will return. I think that's enough, especially if my favorite theory that says it all happened in AD70 is correct. Whatever the truth is, I'm still trying to get past the anxiety all of that causes me. It's the next layer of my journey.

Aftermass

Grace within me
Shine without me

Wise Blood Resolutions

I haven't done very well with my reading list. Wise Blood is the only thing on it I've finished. The rest remain as they were, except Purity in Heart, I've got a bit more of that done. Wise Blood was not as impressive as I had thought it would be. It is her first novel and it lacks the power that The Violent Bear it Away takes for granted. The book did remind me of the uniqueness of Flannery's characters and the way that their originality moves the book along. Harriet has massive pacing problems and some of that could be mitigated by foreshortening my characters in the interests of time. I've been working on some solutions like that, but I'm finding myself liking the smooth as butterscotch characters because I think it is and will be surprising as they come unglued. Despite that I may be able to shrink the plot by pulling it tight around the middle section. All I know is that I have to keep writing. I may not get as much reading done as I'd like--I can live with that. I can't live without writing.